picture in my mind

as if we needed more reason to love

Kim Nam Joon and all of BTS:

💜

Synchronicity or causality, I'm not sure which it is, 

but I've read and watched so much in relation to the theme of Loving Yourself now:

one of which is Jung (whose quotes have been littering my posts).

Jung knew and recognized the element of rascality in himself, and he knew it so strongly, so clearly, and in a way, so lovingly, that he would not condemn the thing in others, and therefore would not be led into those thoughts, feelings, or acts of violence towards others, which are always characteristic of the people who project the devil in themselves upon the outside, upon somebody else, upon the scapegoat. This made Jung a very integrated character. In other words, he was a man who was thoroughly with himself. Having seen and accepted his own nature profoundly, he had a kind of unity and absence of conflict in his own nature. He was the sort of man who could feel anxious and afraid and guilty, without being ashamed of feeling this way. He understood that an integrated person is not simply the person who eliminates the sense of guilt or anxiety from his life, who is fearless or wooden or a sage of stone; he is a person who feels all these things but have not recrimination against himself for feeling them.

It's hard to explain, but all these pieces I've learnt over the past year, about loving yourself, about integration (another buzzword this year Datin S and I concurred over!), about empathy, about gratitude, about true love, finally unlocked for me the whole thing about forgiveness and anger that I was so agonized about a year ago. I was so angry about a lot of things; and at umrah earlier this year, I was sobbing because I just couldn't find a way out from the anger and injustices that appeared so evident in my life and in the world. Then I remember writing about Nabi s.a.w., and how he had that quality of forgiving people huge and unimaginable wrongs, and how I marveled at that ability to be so magnanimous and loving, despite people not seemingly deserving of such love. How do you become such a font of love, such an entity that requires not love be poured into first for love to come pouring out? The kind of person who is kind without needing kindness in return; the kind of person who is calm and compassionate in the face of hurts and pomposity and all manner of degradation and devaluation.

It is this: it is a loving of oneself. That comes most easily with the realisation that at the very least God loves you (if no one else does). But however it is, as long as you love yourself, all of yourself in truth, even the horrid and ugly sides of you, and you truly accept the whole of you -- that you will then learn to be kind to others, love others, and be increasingly magnanimous to humanity, having realised that you, just like everyone else on earth, are both half-good, and half-bad. You will not then condemn anyone else, recognising that there's some possible element of that within you too; we are all the same, humans.